CS2 Major Stickers Explained

What are Major stickers?

Major stickers are special collectibles released for each Counter-Strike Major Championship - the game's biggest tournaments. Each Major gets its own set of team stickers (the logos of the participating teams) and player autograph stickers (individual pro signatures).

They're sold in capsules: team capsules contain the team logos, and autograph capsules contain player signatures. Opening a capsule gives one random sticker from its set, in one of several finishes.

A portion of every Major capsule's sales is shared with the participating teams and players, so buying official event stickers directly supports the scene - one reason the community buys them heavily while a Major is on.

Finish tiers: paper, holo, foil and gold

Major stickers come in finish tiers of increasing rarity. Paper (the standard finish) is the most common and cheapest, followed by shinier tiers such as glitter, holo and foil, up to gold - the rarest, most famously for player autographs.

Rarer finishes are pulled far less often from capsules, which is why a gold autograph of a star player can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars while the paper version of the same sticker costs a few cents.

When people talk about a sticker's value, the finish matters as much as the player or team - a 'Holo' or 'Gold' is a completely different, far pricier item than the 'Paper' of the same name.

Why old Major stickers can be worth a fortune

While a Major is running its capsules drop and supply is high, so stickers are usually at their cheapest. Once the event ends and capsules stop being sold, the supply is permanently fixed - no more can ever be created.

From then on supply only shrinks: every time a sticker is applied to a weapon (and especially when it's 'scraped', or the weapon is traded up or deleted) that copy is removed from the market forever. Fixed supply plus steady collector demand pushes the rarest stickers up over the years.

The extreme example is the first-ever Major set, Katowice 2014: its holo and foil team stickers are among the most valuable items in all of CS2, with the rarest selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Katowice 2015, Cologne 2016, Krakow 2017 and Boston 2018 also hold extremely valuable holos.

Applying, positioning and scraping

A weapon has up to four sticker slots. You can apply a sticker to a slot, then rotate, scale and position it on the model, and you can 'scrape' a sticker to deliberately wear it down for a faded look.

Applying is one-way: once a sticker is on a weapon you cannot peel it back off to re-sell it - you can only remove it by deleting it entirely (losing it). For that reason an applied sticker almost always loses most of its standalone market value.

Because of this, valuable stickers are traded sealed (unapplied). 'Sticker crafts' - applying rare stickers to a skin as a permanent combination - are their own niche, where the right stickers can add large premiums to a weapon, but it's a one-way commitment.

Buying Major stickers on skins.ai

skins.ai has a dedicated page for every Major sticker collection - from the current event back to the legendary Katowice 2014 - listing each sticker and capsule with live prices compared across every marketplace. Browse them all from the CS2 Majors hub at /cs2/events.

Each sticker's own page compares its price across every marketplace we track and highlights the cheapest place to buy, so you never overpay - whether you're after a cheap paper team sticker or a rare gold autograph.

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